I always hesitate to include Phoenix games in these things. Their catalogue could more than fill the entire feature, and picking on them just seems sort of like throwing crap at a guy in a wheel chair. Still, I can't quite imagine anyone earnestly believing that this cover would sell games. Actually, it kind of reminds me of a National Geographic picturebook of spiders I had when I was a kid. If someone held this thing up in front of my face I'd pay them to stop.

You've played adventure games. You've played survival horror games. You have years of experience facing unsolvable puzzles and unspeakable nightmare creatures thirsting for your blood. You may think you're ready, but nothing has prepared you for an unrelenting onslaught of mechanical birds air-dropping waves of brain damaged infants. Nothing human can survive when the only way to survive is to sacrifice your humanity.

F*CK YEAH! NINJAS AND... er, well... scooters. You know, I don't think there's any quantity of skulls, spikes, or diagonal hot pink lines that could make that even a little bit awesome. The only possible explanation is that they started off with Ninja Space Shuttle Surfing Simulator and worked their way through everything radical, eventually passing through Ninja Crochet Simulator and finally ended up here.

At the top of my list of things I never wanted to see you might once have found "hamster playing maraccas." It has since been bumped down a spot by "hula dancing mice." The only thing more horrifying is the sales figures for these things, which statistically imply that I'm some kind of deviant for thinking that mice and grass skirts should never have anything to do with each other.

Then again, maybe Silverbird was just shaking up a jar of pissed off bees with words glued to them and used the first few that stung somebody after they took the lid off. Sometimes you'd get something like Ninja Scooter Simulator. Sometimes you got SKATE BOARD JOUST DEATH. I don't know that "Death" is actually a part of that title, but I'd rather live in a delusional universe where it is. Having the whole title written on a giant green Easter egg about to roll over a satanic monkey with spider infested armpits is just showboating at this point.

killer kong....

magic hat

"[T]he Sorcerer Lord's scraggly mustache and slightly concussed expression" is a description that will go down in history. That shit had me laughing out loud. You have outdone yourself, Mr. Sharkey. You deserve that hooker-infested hot tub.

this one

Barbarian II

Sharkey, I think you had a little mix-up there. There are two different Barbarian series. The cover in the article is Barbarian II which was develped by Palace. The Barbarian games by Psygnosis weren't as bad as the Palace ones eventhough the covers were awful, too.